My Wonderful Kid Makes Me Very Happy

The kid sent me a text today, saying he thinks he might have to get a PhD after all. 

He says he loves graduate school and never wants to leave it.

He's also turned out to be an excellent teacher, just like his mama.

Whining

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm on campus from 6:00 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. That's just too LOOOOONG.

I come that early so I can drink coffee and prep. My actual first class is at 8:00 a.m. So I could come a little later, but on the other hand, I can't teach without coffee and prep, so.

I've got three classes in a row from 8:00 until 12:15, and then a break until 2:00, when my fourth class starts. I also have an online class, which I am always working on. It's a lot, but it's a schedule which gives me a four-day weekend to spend writing, so I guess it's worth it. 

I'm just really, really tired by the time I hit that fourth class.

Only four weeks until fall break.

LOL

Maybe my favorite moment from the debate last night:

Trump: She’s going to take your gun

Kamala: Bitch I have a gun

— Adam (@adamgreattweet) September 11, 2024

Don't get me wrong, assault weapons should definitely be banned; but I've listened for years now to MAGAts squeal about how they're going to win the civil war that they are convinced is coming because they "have all the guns," and I just shake my head. 

There may be a couple of Far-Right white nationalists with a ton of weapons, for whatever bizarre reason; but I know a lot of leftists who have weapons. 

I mean, granted, it's Arkansas, but still.

This was also a stellar moment. It came right after Harris noted that people were leaving Trump's rallies because they were so bored by his lies. He lost it right then and started shouting this kind of thing, and he never got it back:

You can literally pinpoint the exact moment where Trump lost the debate. pic.twitter.com/yzNV9BCpu9

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) September 11, 2024

Reminded me of this moment, which is probably why Harris's team had her do it: 

Yes Obama made a dick joke during his DNC speech. https://t.co/m1rCWSIXVR pic.twitter.com/9QV14XrSvC

— Nick ✨ (@slothropsmap) August 21, 2024

My Kid Does Art

This is off a photo I took, probably around 1988, of my brother sitting on a rock in Northern California. I forget just what river that is. Somewhere in the Sequoia Mountains, I think.

Watercolor on paper.

What's This?

It was 58 degrees when I woke up this morning, and only 60 degrees now. That's cool enough to open the windows and doors. The cats are very happy.

How It Works

So I'm on this Fort Smith site on FB, which group members use to post questions, comments, and general news about the city. It's a cesspool of meanness and spite, so I usually don't read what's been posted there. I should really delete my membership to the page.

But then I would have missed this! On Wednesday of last week, where someone was asking why the Singaporean flag* was being flown at the air force base, someone said (as a joke) that it was because Fort Smith was going to be made a sanctuary city.

It was clearly a joke -- no one from Singapore is a refugee, for fuck's sake -- but by the next day someone had posted a question to the page, about whether Fort Smith was really going to become a sanctuary city.

And today people are stating, as a fact, that Fort Smith is a sanctuary city, and that's why we have so many homeless people and so much crime.

Misinformation becomes data becomes worldview. Welcome to your Red State experience.

*Here's why the flag was actually being flown

It's Official

I submitted my intention to retire letter, and it has been officially accepted. Last day of work: May 13, 2025. I can see the end from here.

When the kid was little, and we were driving back and forth to Fayetteville, or to Clarksville for our writing group, there would often be a moment when, as exhausted as we were, Dr. Skull and I would begin to feel like we would never reach home.

As we passed a mileage marker (49 miles to Fort Smith), one or the other of us would say, "Fort Smith is getting further and further away."

The kid would often say, "It's not! What do you mean? It's NOT."

Now he says he understands what we mean. He was coming home from teaching on the bus and he was like, "Home is getting further and further away."

That's me right now. Retirement is getting further and further away.

Weather in Arkansas

It's September 6 and we're supposed to get some cooler weather tomorrow: like a low of 57, and a high of 82,

After that, it's back up in the high 80s for the next ten days. 

It's almost fall. Two more weeks. I need cold weather.

I Am Very Excited Today Because

I'm very excited today because not only does Natasha Pulley have a new book coming out, but also I scored a review copy. 

Second go! This is the US cover of The Hymn To Dionysus, which will be out next year. I feel like a purple book is a good book. pic.twitter.com/SFJieAXw45

— Natasha Pulley (@natasha_pulley) August 20, 2024

Reading 1950s Science Fiction

George O. Smith,  The Fourth 'R' 

I picked this one up at a used bookstore, because it was cheap and the cover looked interesting.

This cover

I'd never read any George O. Smith before, though Wikipedia tells me he comes from the Golden Age of science fiction -- Isaac Asimov's buddy, contemporary of Heinlein, worked with John Campbell (and apparent ran away with Campbell's wife -- spicy!).

This book was published in 1959, and is about a kid whose parents invent a machine which educates the child from toddlerhood on, packing data into his young brain. This is apparently all it takes to give someone an education -- they just gotta know a lot of facts. Once you know a lot of facts, like the times table for instance, and a bunch of grammatical terms, and who Aristotle is, why, you're automatically a genius. That's all it takes: having facts crammed into you.

Smith doesn't think much of the educational system of his day, which he shares with many other SF writers from that era. When little Jimmy is sent to school, for instance, he runs into trouble with a "progressive" teacher who thinks all children were created equal, and "had to stay that way." In the early pages of the book, Smith also takes a swipe at John Dewey. 

Dewey had some influence on the educational system of the time, and pissed off a lot of conservatives. Dewey thought that for American democracy to work, we had to educate even people who weren't brilliant geniuses. As I recall, Harper Lee also hated Dewey's influence on education. In To Kill a Mockingbird, she has the young narrator react scornfully to her teacher's attempt to teach all the children in the class to read. Because Scout herself can already read, she's bored, and this is somehow a flaw in the educational system. Fuck them other kids, am I right? 

This is probably the weakest part of The Fourth R. Knowing facts doesn't make someone a genius, or turn a five year old into an adult. And that's what Smith is claiming here -- it's not that Jimmy Holden is a genius and the brain machine just educates him really fast. No, he's a typical kid, and the brain machine makes him a genius, the equivalent at five of someone in their early 20s. We know this is so because later in the book, Jimmy uses the brain machine to make an extremely ordinary seven year old, Martha, into a genius just like him.

Well, not just like him. Martha is a girl, see, so she's not that interested in math. Instead she's interested in learning all about how to run a home. Like sewing and cooking. You know, that stuff that girl geniuses really love.

Anyway, before Martha shows up, Jimmy is a victim of his evil godfather, Paul Brennan, who murders Jimmy's parents and then becomes Jimmy's guardian and the executor of his estate. Brennan mistreats little Jimmy by taking away his Meccano set and making him play with blocks instead. This is because Brennan wants the brain machine all for himself, so he can make money with it. The wanting to make money with it is not the problem, as Smith makes clear: the problem is that the machine belongs to Jimmy, because his parents invented it, so only Jimmy should be making money from it.

 Jimmy foils Brennan's plan by destroying the brain machine. Good thing Jimmy's parents didn't leave blueprints, am I right?

Anyway, Brennan is trying to blackmail Jimmy into building a new brain machine for him. Jimmy knows how to do this, because the machine taught him how. I guess you could say that's how Jimmy's parents stored the blueprints, in Jimmy's brain. 

There's some talk by Jimmy's grandparents into beating him into compliance, but Brennan doesn't want to use physical torture, since that would leave marks which Jimmy could complain about. So he sets out to bore him into submission instead. Clearly no court will care about Jimmy being forced to read Little Golden books instead of Aristotle, or being given blocks and finger paints instead of oil paints and canvases. 

Again, knowing facts in conflated with having knowledge -- even though Jimmy is five, he can and wants to read Aristotle, and paint with oils, simply because the brain machine put data into his brain. This is all it takes to make a genius, embedding facts. Later, when Jimmy is ten and his Pygmalion playmate Martha is nine, Martha's mother, Janet, is fine with leaving a nine and ten year old on their own for three or four months, because they've been made into geniuses by the brain machine. 

You gotta wonder if Smith had ever met a genius, never mind a ten year old genius.

Anyway, fleeing Brennan, Jimmy sets up housekeeping on his own, funding his existence by writing science fiction. (It was, in fact, possible to make a living writing in the 1950s, so I won't mock Brennan here.)

He needs to hire Martha's mother Janet as a housekeeper to act as cover; he chooses her because she has a young girl, which he knows will make her desperate enough to stay in the job. He convinces her to let him hook Martha up to the machine because he needs a companion, and also he thinks that will be yet another thing that will keep Janet working for him. He offers to hook Mom up to the machine, but she's not interested. All she wants to do is have the machine embed some "pet recipes" into her brain. Because (1) she's cooking without knowing those recipes and (b) that's what women like to do, cook and keep house.

The plot swerves a little when Janet starts dating a local guy. (Jimmy has set up housekeeping in a small town somewhere.) Now Jimmy, who's nine now, has to try to figure out sex. Remember this is before the internet. The local public library has nothing useful. He buys books through newspaper ads, but they don't really tell him what he wants to know, which is why Janet wants to have sex. It's a puzzler!

Anyway! Eventually Jimmy decides the time has come to settle with Brennan. So he makes himself into a lawyer by having the brain machine embed a bunch of law books into his brain. That's all it takes. No need to learn how to argue or think critically! You just gotta know the laws! There's a courtroom scene, and Jimmy gains control of his machine and his life and sets up academies where other children are made into geniuses with brain machines, but to be honest I just skimmed through the last 20 or 30 pages, because I had long since stopped caring about any of these characters. 

This is typical of 1950s science fiction, in my experience -- there's a cool idea, which is then used to explore the author's personal bugaboos. Pretty much no attempt at characterization, setting, or realistic dialogue. 4/10, only interesting for historical purposes.